If it isn’t bad enough Al Gore got a Nobel Peace Prize for An Inconvenient Truth (among other global warming climate change “sky is falling” alarms), the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has now made use of global warming climate change to move their famous clock two minutes closer to midnight — aka “doomsday.”
The Doomsday Clock had stood at five minutes until 12:00, but the scientists moved it up to a mere three this past Thursday.
The move was made because, as bulletin executive director Kennette Benedict had noted, “both climate change and modernization of nuclear weaponry [are] equal but undeniable threats to humanity’s continued existence.”
The Associated Press (via Philly.com) reports:
She called both climate change and modernization of nuclear weaponry equal but undeniable threats to humanity’s continued existence that triggered the 20 scientists on the board to decide to move the clock closer to midnight.
“The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon,” Benedict said.
But other scientists aren’t quite so pessimistic.
Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of both geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, said in an email: “I suspect that humans will ‘muddle through’ the climate situation much as we have muddled through the nuclear weapons situation – limiting the risk with cooperative international action and parallel domestic policies.”
The bulletin has included climate change in its doomsday clock since 2007.
“The fact that the Doomsday clock-setters changed their definition of ‘doomsday’ shows how profoundly the world has changed – they have to find a new source of doom because global thermonuclear war is now so unlikely,” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in an email. Pinker in his book “The Better Angels of our Nature” uses statistics to argue that the world has become less war-like, less violent and more tolerant in recent decades and centuries.
A member of the Bulletin’s board, Richard Somerville, agreed that “the threat from climate change isn’t quite as all-or-nothing as it is with nuclear war.”
Gosh, y’think?
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